A Friendly Town That's Almost Always by the Ocean!: 05/04/18

A Friendly Town That's Almost Always by the Ocean! by Kir Fox (Kirsten Hubbard) and M. Shelley Coats (Michelle Schusterman) is the first book in the Secrets of Topsea middle grade series. Davy Jones and his mother have moved to this weird seaside town for a new start after the death of Mr. Jones. Davy is finding it hard to fit in even though the kids and adults seem friendly enough. Everything though about the town and its people seems weird. Davy feels like the only normal kid here and that's after coming from a town where he was anything but normal.

That set up sounds like any one of a certain type of middle grade novels. You know the type — the new kid in town who has a checkered past and is now a fish out of water. Often the kid has grown up in the big city (or a suburb of one) and is now living in some out of the way country town that has maybe fifty people in it.

It is that, certainly, but it's so much more, in a very slim volume (193 pages with illustrations). The best way to describe A Friendly Town That's Almost Always by the Ocean! is to say it's like Welcome to Nightvale but for middle graders. In fact you can read the entire book in the time that it takes to listen to two episodes of Nightvale.

Where Nigthvale has the weather, Topsea has the tide reports. Where Nightvale has the hooded figures, Topsea has the PTA. Nightvale has the Dog Park; Topsea has a Water Park. Beware of old oak doors in Nightvale, likewise basements and sub-basements in Topsea. I could go on and on with comparisons, but you get the idea.

The spine of A Friendly Town That's Almost Always by the Ocean has a handy 1 on it. I don't know what is planned for the second or when it's scheduled for release. I can, however, tell you that I will be ordering a copy to read as soon as it becomes available.

Five stars

Comments (2)